Flury shook his head. The tiny voices were making his ears buzz. “I don’t care if you haven’t fulfilled your mission. You seem to me to have done enough. The wretched fellow is wandering about looking as if a house has fallen on him.” Ignoring the assassins’ further attempts to scream that Corkoran was not the target!, he spread his wings and flew out into the countryside with them. There were several farms about ten miles off where Flury had been cadging food, and he wanted his lunch.
He had described Corkoran exactly. Around the time Flury was finishing an excellent lunch, Corkoran was shambling around the edge of the main courtyard on his way to the White Lion, oblivious of students streaming out of Myrna’s lecture. Corkoran had forgotten all about teaching this last week. Most of his students had realized and considerately not turned up. Corkoran was not interested in that or in anything much any longer. He barely looked up when a great black griffin coasted down to land beside Wizard Policant. Nor did he look around when Kit’s arrival was followed by the whipcrack of Blade appearing. Elda’s happy shrieks of greeting only made him wince.
“Oh. You’ve got rid of the cloakrack,” Blade said to Claudia. He felt rather cheated.
Claudia saw how he felt. “It was another accident,” she said. “The wizard who did it is now a bar stool.” She chuckled about it. Her eyes glowed, and a delighted greenish dimple appeared in one cheek.
Blade gazed at her laughing face and discovered that he did not mind too much about the cloakrack. He said, “Oh, no! Really?” and laughed, too.
But here Felim and Ruskin advanced on Blade and Kit with sheets of paper. “We think it may be possible to translocate a man to the moon,” Fe
lim said, “by a combined boost of shared power. Would either of you agree?”
“In a bubble of air,” Ruskin said, holding up a page of drawings. “Like so.”
As Blade took the papers with considerable interest and Kit leaned over his shoulder to look at them, too, Olga explained, “Elda was terribly upset when Corkoran’s moonship was destroyed. She got us thinking of other ways to get him there.”
Griffins do not blush. Elda wriggled and felt ashamed. “He looked so devastated,” she said, wishing she had never, ever told anyone that Corkoran reminded her of a teddy bear. “But you don’t have to bother,” she added earnestly.
“Well, I can’t see why anyone would want to go to the moon myself,” Blade said, “But this looks as if it could work. Kit’s got the strongest boost of anyone I know. What do you think, Kit?”
“Let’s take another look at that air bubble,” Kit said. “We wouldn’t want to kill him.” He skewered Ruskin’s page of drawings on a talon and studied it closely. “I’d double this,” he said at length. “You always need a safety margin, and it would make the outside harder if you packed more compressed air in. What say, Blade? No time like the present. Isn’t that Corkoran over by the main gate? Shall I fetch him here?”
Claudia said swiftly, “He might find that a bit overwhelming.”
“We’ll go,” said Olga.
Corkoran was on his way through the gate when running feet approached him. He looked around with slow surprise at Olga on one side of him and Lukin, very breathless, on the other.
“You do still want to go to the moon, don’t you?” Lukin panted.
Now they were having a joke with him, Corkoran thought.
“If you do,” Olga said, tossing a sheet of her hair off her face, “Kit and Blade can send you there now.”
Kit and Blade, Corkoran thought. Two of the most powerful wizards there were. He looked back over his shoulder, and there indeed was Kit, with Blade looking child-size against him, conferring with Ruskin, who looked child-size against Blade, all of them passing pieces of paper about. Felim stood beside Elda, evidently explaining, with strong, spell-like gestures of his brown hands, and Claudia was beside Felim, nodding. Perhaps Olga meant what she said. Perhaps this thing was possible after all.
Corkoran straightened his plain white tie. “Let’s give it a try, anyway,” he said.
They led him back to the statue, where Kit explained quite briefly what they meant to do and then braced himself low on the ground with his legs spread for balance. Blade swiftly organized the rest of them into a ring around Corkoran, so that Elda was clasping Kit’s right foreleg and Ruskin his left one, and Blade himself took the final place facing Kit, between Claudia and Felim, while Lukin and Olga stretched their arms wide on the sides to make the ring as even as possible. “Go,” Blade said.
The air bubble began to form around Corkoran. He looked at it, marveling. It was expanding and hardening to a beautiful misty blueness when Flury came flying gently back across the Spellman Building. As soon as he saw what was going on by the statue, he gave a shriek of horror and went into a dive.
“No!” he screamed. “Not with whatshername in there!” He hit the courtyard in what was probably the worst landing a grown griffin had ever made and, stumbling, legs sliding in four directions, wings beating for balance, tried to hurry toward the statue. “Stop!” he shrieked.
As he shrieked, the misty blue bubble expanded to enclose everyone around Corkoran. Flury could see all their heads turn to look at it and the mystified expressions on their faces for an instant. Then the bubble vanished, blasting Flury backward with the force of its going.
He picked himself up miserably and hobbled toward the statue. “That’ll teach me to teach people things, won’t it?” he said, and looked uselessly up into the cloudy sky. “I suppose they’ve all gone to the moon now.”
“No,” said the statue of Wizard Policant. “They missed the moon.”
Flury limped another step and stared into the statue’s stone face. “Er, did you speak?”
“Yes. I said that they missed the moon,” the statue replied. “Two of them had jinxes. It’s been irritating me profoundly that no one’s done anything about them.”
“Did they take enough air?” Flury demanded.
“Enough air for what?” asked the statue. “I’ve no idea where they’ve gone.”